Outsourcing can be a topic of contention

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One thing that cannot be outsourced is your internal internet connection with your provider,

your switches, hubs, ethernet cabling, phones and end-user computers. The best you can do

is outsource the maintenance of them by hiring an IT company. That is up to you.

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Just a quick short story about my experiences with outsourcing.

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For a company with about 100 employees and gross revenue of about 100

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What can be outsourced is a database. 

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I worked for an online pharmacy as their senior programmer, administrated the VMWare and administrated the databases. There were two of us in these roles.

The company also outsourced some programming, they wanted to accelerate their milestones and quickly get all the vertical market software up and running quickly.

Well there is a problem. To get these outsourced programmers working, someone has to write the specifications. And they need to be accurate specs. Who is going to do that?

Me and the other guy kinda' stayed from that, we were not asked to work on the specs and we did not volunteer - it's your baby.

Guess how this worked out? It didn't.

The offshore progammers ...
    Could not program to the specs.
    They argued all the time.
    They deliberately went off spec with their own ideas.
    Their program were always late.
    Then they delivered software, they always had a hard time getting it working.
    They argued with employees.
    Ask for a revision or addition to the spec and ooh boy, you should of told us about this before, now we have to rewrite everything!
    The owners brought in more shareholders, and I haven't talked about when the SOX auditors showed up.
    Me and my colleague. Our servers and software passed the audits, we were done with the audit within a week.
    Not the offshore programmers. The auditors absolutely hammered them.
    But they kept on invoicing.

    I saw some of the invoices for what they did.
    At the end of the day, the corporation would of been better off with us two doing the work. It would of been less expensive and better quality. But it would of taken us about 12 more months to complete.

There have been two other times in my career I've dealt with offshore programmers. Never once was their a good outcome. Always contention and poor product.

Then at the same company, the executive wanted to basically turn off all the servers in our rack and move it all to Azure. I told the President, to be careful, our servers are under control and don't cost a lot. And I told him you are writing a blank check.

Well guess what? He found out when he got a bill for one month. It was over $9,000. For one month. But he was in a contract with them and could not get out.

What got him was the traffic. 

I suggested we put everything back on to our servers and use Azure as a backup.

Why am I bringing this up.

Because creating and using the database created by MediSeek Recaster will cause traffic.

Every time you run Recaster, presumably once a month, it'll be about 80 gigabytes of traffic. 

You can bet the marketing people will be looking at hundreds of thousands of NPI's. It will rack up.

If you are on your own servers, it's a good bet to stay there. If you want to host the database on some hosted server, be prepared for a bill.

And this is why should you decide MediSeek will host the database and you access it via the MediSeek Trek REST API, then we incur the traffic, and we have to charge for that.

Also keep in mind that just because you host elsewhere, the hosting company will back up the database files.

But can they perform backups of SQL Server transaction logs. If you are not doing that, you can wind up with a problem.

Do they rebuild indexes when needed? Better check the contract, because indexes do need to be periodically rebuilt.





 

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